Education Festival 2022

The Education Festival will take place from 4 to 8 April 2022. In working on a varied, new (mostly online) programme comprising workshops, lectures, panel discussions, and videos, we are inspired by the enthusiasm of everyone we met during the previous edition and the feedback that you gave us. This year’s festival is titled ‘Making connections for quality education’.

The Education Festival 2022 program is now available to browse.

The online registration to the EF 2022 is now open. After registration you will receive updates with links to sessions and the locations of on-site workshops.

Some of our UCG staff will be involved in this year's Education Festival.

Tuesday, 5 April

Dr. Christopher May, Associate Professor, UCG

13.30 - 14.00 - Examining the Implications of a Predictive Processing Account of Critical Thinking for Teaching

In this interactive lecture, I will first give an overview of a paper I recently published with colleagues, in which we proposed that an increasingly regarded theoretical framework in neuroscience—the predictive processing framework—can help to advance an understanding of the foundations of critical thinking. This framework can also provide a mechanistic hypothesis for how education may increase a learner’s subsequent use of critical thinking outside of an educational context. After presenting the main tenets of this paper, I will then unpack and give examples of its implications for teaching. Finally, I will ask participants to think about and share their own examples of how they do (or could) incorporate the insights from this proposal into their classroom.

---

Wednesday, 6 April

Dr. Christopher May , Associate Professor, UCG

11.00 - 11.45 - Experiments with bringing mindfulness and contemplation into academic teaching

Mindfulness is used increasingly as a tool to improve well-being and reduce stress, but has also been suggested to improve general cognitive skills such as attention and meta-cognition.

15.30 - 16.00 - A journey from closed to open: Using open educational resources for quality teaching and education

With this session, we want to highlight the value of using open educational resources (OER) in designing and delivering quality education, and try to move beyond the idea that working with OER is only an alternative to working with commercial/copyrighted materials.

---

Thursday, 7 April

Dr. Bettina van Hoven - Academic Director of Education, UCG with prof. dr. Jan Riezebos, FEB & dr. Gerald Jonker

09.00 - 09.45 - Kick-off talks assessment

Assessment and feedback are essential to student learning. In these interactive kick off talks, three UG lecturers will give short introductions on important focus areas for assessment at UG: continuous and formative assessment and assessment of group work. This session starts with  a short introduction on what we wish to achieve with assessment in the coming years, as well as why and how.

Thursday, 7 April

Dr. Oksana Kavatsyuk - Assistant Professor, UCG

Dr. Laura Kapinga, Lecturer, UCG

13.00 - 13.30 - Setting up an interdisciplinary course: connecting disciplines and inspiring students

How to set-up an interdisciplinary course? With whom to collaborate? How to decide on topics, stay focused and connect disciplines? We will discuss these and other aspects of teaching an interdisciplinary course on an example of a new Year 1 course at UCG “This is the Sea”.